path of exile

BelToxica and Red Maps

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Good Morning Friends! This morning I am going to share some nonsense about my second character for the Crucible league in Path of Exile. In the last league I fiddled around a bit with a few different Toxic Rain builds, but I never fully committed to them. I tried a Trickster variant and a Pathfinder variant, and of the two I definitely preferred Pathfinder if for no reason other than the fact that the Shadow voice lines annoy me. When it came time for me to futz around on a second character I decided to give it a shot. Mostly the pattern that I fell into the last league was to farm Sulphite with my alt and then largely reserve my Righteous Fire main to doing deeper levels of Delve. Mostly I originally did this because I did not want to risk taking a dumb death and setting back my leveling progress. However, over time I found I enjoyed flipping between two characters for its own benefit.

Having played a few variants of Toxic Rain last league combined with the fact that Zizaran declared that this was his league starter for Crucible. I cobbled together my build from bits and pieces of a good number of guides. Now for Righteous Fire which relies on Armor and Regeneration, I felt like I fully understood how to make that class feel good. I have never managed to get very far in any class relying on evasion gear, so I am not even sure what to target for defenses. In theory, my guess is that you want 90% avoidance similar to how you want 90% mitigation from armor… and I am so very far away from that number.

Last night I finished the campaign and spent some time shopping on trade to cobble together a set of mostly rare gear focused on Evasion and Energy Shield since I need the later for Eldritch Battery. I am wearing The Restless Ward in part because I happened to have one laying around and I noticed that Zizaran was also wearing this chest… likely because it provides a good deal of Evasion and Energy Shield. I spent ENTIRELY too much currency on making it a six-link so if I had it all to do over I absolutely would not have gone down that rabbit hole. However, once I was committed to it, frustration and stubbornness kicked in and by god, I was going to be the random number generator no matter how much currency I threw at it. I would have been far better served by just getting a high evasion rare chest from trade for around 10 Chaos.

Last night after painstakingly getting my resists perfect and equipping viable gear for every slot… I opted to run a few maps. In total, I did a Tier 1 white map, a Tier 10 yellow map, and a Tier 14 red map and was able to successfully clear all of them. I did however take way more deaths than I was happy with, which led me to search on my phone last night while laying in bed. Essentially so long as I did not get hit, I could clear entire screens at once but if I got touched… I basically crumpled and died. I mean admittedly… high-level Greater Rifts on the Demon Hunter in Diablo III mostly this way as well. So long as you can duck and dodge out of the way of encounters you can wipe the screen but the moment you get noticed you take a death. This would be an acceptable risk were it not for the annoyingly stiff death penalties in Path of Exile. When you are 95 a single death can set you back a day’s worth of leveling.

Ultimately what I landed on was that I had been playing Pathfinder wrong. Essentially the Pathfinder specialization is all about flask effect and charge recovery so that you effectively have the equivalent of a Mageblood with all of your flasks up extremely often. As a result, the correct way to play this class is to proactively keep your life flask rolling at all times. What this does in practice is make it so that when you do get hit, you zoom right back up to full health quickly without investing in massive amounts of regeneration. I still think it would feel better however with more spell suppression and more evasion so that I am just getting hit less often. Similarly, I need a bit more health so that I am further from “one-shot” territory which will allow the flask to do its work.

I’m only level 78 and I’ve also not run my 4th Labyrinth which I should knock out today. That will give me Nature’s Boon which gives me a 30% increased Flask Effect and the pathing node 10% charge generation. This should increase the uptime of everything making it feel stronger. The biggest thing that I need to do is figure out how to squeeze in a 4th aura and get the rest of my assorted abilities online like Malevolence cast with Divine Blessing. I’m also not actually using Despair right now for cursing purposes, which is additional damage I am leaving on the table. So essentially I have room for improvement but the fact that it can already run Red Maps… seems like a win to me. If nothing else this will allow me to comfortably generate Delve juice to feed those adventures on the Righteous Fire Juggernaut.

Then there is the problem I have with Path of Exile where finding one item… makes me want to build an entirely new character around it. While searching the market for something completely different I stumbled onto this helmet that was dirt cheap for what it offered. This is now making me want to start a Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer and lean toward fire like I did last league. This helm would in theory allow me to create a pseudo-eight-link for Summon Raging Spirits. I am just not sure if I will go for traditional Fire SRS or Minion Instability Exploding SRS. Whatever the case… I am starting to stockpile decent items that I happen to find along the way that would make that build work. I find that I am coming to love the absolute bullshit levels of minutiae and build crafting of Path of Exile.

Oopsiversary

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Good Morning Friends! This year I have been more than a little bit scatterbrained and unfocused. As a result, many things have slipped… not the least of which is realizing that it is apparently anniversary time. For whatever reason I tend to start a lot of things in April and both the anniversary of Tales of the Aggronaut (April 17th, 2009) and our AggroChat Podcast (April 13th, 2014) landed this month. Then there was April 26th of 2013 when I started what I called the “Grand Experiment” of forcing myself to blog every single day which lasted a little over three years before landing on something more manageable of “every weekday unless I really don’t feel like it”. You could say that this also ultimately led to the creation of Blaugust because I personally found a lot of success in forcing myself to blog damn the torpedos.

In the grand scheme of things the key to longevity for me, was to shift my focus of this blog as a vehicle for some specific planned idea… and instead just make it about whatever I happened to want to be talking about at the time. This is my blog… the Bel does dumb nonsense blog… and if you are along for the ride awesome. If this is not your jam, that is also awesome because I realize I am very much an acquired taste. I don’t have an overwhelming number of readers to be honest, but the ones I do have… end up being exceptionally loyal. Most of them are people that I legitimately consider friends… which is why in part the whole recent verbiage of “Good Morning Friends” is not inherently dishonest. I realize I am mostly talking to a circle of friends that occasionally has some rando stumble into that conversation. The thing is… those randos are also more than welcome to hang out and become friends too.

When I post on social media that I am not making a post for a given day… it isn’t out of some ego trip because I know the world continues to tick along just fine if I have not extruded words. I do it because in the past when I have skipped a day… I had a lot of folks checking in on me to make sure I am okay. I do it out of a sense of not wanting to make this community of friends that read my ramblings worry about me. Honestly, my favorite part about joining the Fediverse and leaving Twitter has been just how many new faces I have seen join the ranks of people who appear to be consuming my nonsense each day. I want you all to feel welcome, but also I am still mostly writing these posts like I am talking to myself so… sorry for not being more interesting.

So if you have been reading my blog for a bit, you will probably be familiar with Tripod… the admittedly horribly named three-legged feral calico cat that lives in our backyard. I’ve not talked about this situation lately because it honestly really depressed me. Roughly a month ago… two dogs got into our yard under the front fence and seemingly chased her off. We’ve been watching anxiously hoping for any signs of her, checking the video camera feeds multiple times per day hoping for a glimpse of her. We were starting to worry that something had happened to her. The next-door neighbor saw the dogs chasing her, but also that she got away from them and they did not follow. However, we’ve learned from experience in the past with other backyard ferals… that when they disappear they are often gone permanently.

However last night while my wife was sitting on the back patio reading, she showed back up. I went out and put some food out but she was too skittish to come over and eat. My hope is that once my wife went inside she fed, though I did not notice her on the camera. That said she is also pretty damned good at avoiding detection algorithms. This morning she was milling around the little house we have in the backyard for her, so my hope is she spent the night there. When I go out to feed in a few minutes I am hoping that she comes out and eats. I mean it isn’t like she is defenseless and I am certain that she is more than capable of catching a meal… but she also looks way thinner than when we last saw her. I cannot explain fully what a gift it is to see her again because we were overwhelmed with concern for the last several weeks. So much so that I just could not bring myself to write about it.

In other nighttime visitor news… we have a few adorable Raccoons and at least one very chubby Possum that come by. I really should start uploading to Catfriend Television again, my dumb YouTube channel that I started during the pandemic where I uploaded clips from our security cameras of cats and other visitors. There is one video clip that I have somewhere that shows two raccoons up on the porch, and another few waiting in the wings on the sidewalk. I feel like some people would have a drastically different reaction than I do… but so long as they are not causing a mess I am more than happy to have them visiting. When I was a Scout camp counselor, I remember some raccoons getting into my igloo cooler and stealing my dry Gatorade powder. Maybe I should put some out for them and see if this group likes that too. I know it was a raccoon because there were sticky red paw prints leading out of my tent.

Lastly, I recorded another one of my dumb videos yesterday. I have been running up an alt in Path of Exile and was amused at just how easily Toxic Rain Ballista/Caustic Arrow deletes mobs. I was talking to my friend Ace about it and decided to record a video showing it off. Granted this is just the campaign and I have no idea if this will continue into mapping… but I am probably going to do a follow-up video once I have verified that it still remains good. Like always I mostly record these for me, or for some other purpose than to ever get YouTube viewers. I enjoy making these short dumb videos, and just like with my blog… am perfectly fine if no one actually consumes them.

Anyways! I am officially in my fifteenth year with this blog and I just want to thank you all for following me on this journey. At this point, daily blogging is so ingrained in my person that I am pretty sure I will be doing this 25 years from now as well. The slow death of social media has only served to drive home just how important it is to me to have a place on the internet that I can call entirely my own.

Two Voidstones Down

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Good Morning Friends! It is another morning and another post about assorted Path of Exile nonsense. Last night I managed to get up to the point of fighting the Searing Exarch and the Eater of Worlds, which means I am effectively at the same point I closed out the last league with two void stones collected. I made attempts at Uber Elder but failed miserably in the last league. Effectively to get the next two void stones I will need to beat Uber Elder and then take down Maven with her memory game. I remember limping across the finish line in both Searing Exarch and Eater of Worlds last league, but I defeated both without taking any deaths this time around.

I think the key difference is that my defenses are just much stronger this league than they were last. I am sitting at 90% fire resistance which combined with the rest of my defensive layers allowed me to just stand in most of the mechanics during the Searing Exarch. There is a phase in the fight where you have to dodge a bunch of incoming fireballs. I was too busy paying attention to the fight to take a screenshot, but here is one that I found online. In my current defensive posture… I could just stand there and ignore the fireballs entirely letting them hit me and explode without taking anywhere close to fatal damage. I figure if enough of them had hit me directly at the same time it might have knocked me out, but I at least dodged around enough to make sure I was only getting hit by one or two at a time.

The best-laid plans sometimes fail miserably… and for me, it was the fact that I thought I would be able to use the “no life modifiers” passive with my Brass Dome. It turns out that the negative life modifier of losing health from strength… knocks that chest piece out of the running. This means in order to use it… I am just going to lose some regeneration and total life. Here is what my defenses look like after the swap of some gear around losing some overcap fire res, some raw regeneration, and some raw health… but gaining permanent 90% physical damage reduction and crit immunity. In truth it isn’t really something that I notice so long as I am not eating some sort of degeneration effect, and across the board I just feel like my health bar almost never moves.

While making some gear swaps, I decided to get myself a budget pseudo-six-link helm. Traditionally for this play, you want level 20 Burning Damage and Concentrated Effect, but those helms are a bit out of my price range with the worst options sitting around 2 Divine Orbs and the best option available at 50. What I did instead is go for the arguably worse but still valid Less Duration, and I was able to pick up the helm shown above for 5 Chaos Orbs. I had to adjust sockets, chrome, and link it but I did so easily with the bench craft socket recipe. This gear swap takes the damage calculation in POB for my Fire Trap from just under 500 DPS to right at 1 million DPS. This was immediately noticeable and since I only really use Fire Trap during burn phases or while circle-strafing a boss… the spammy nature of less duration doesn’t really bother me.

One of the things I do each league is set aside the first white socketed weapons that I get for the purpose of “muling” gems in my secondary weapon slots. Last league I found a six-socketed white staff which was nice, and this time around I happened upon a pair of 3 socketed one-handed maces. It doesn’t really matter what you use, but I find white sockets handy for swapping up whatever gems I happen to want to level. Yesterday I finished my first project which was leveling 6 Righteous Fire gems to 20… doing the vendor recipe to swap them for 20% quality level 1 gems… and then level them again and corrupt them. I lucked out and managed to get 2 of the level 21 20% quality gems that I was seeking, and now have started “muling” some Fire Trap gems to hopefully do the same. I could in theory just buy the damned things, but this is simple enough and I kill more than enough mobs to level the gems pretty efficiently.

I think the next big project for me is to try and find a Sceptre base with a good Crucible tree… and then attempt to craft myself something with +1 gems and all of the assorted fire stats that I care about. Before then I might be shopping for some slightly better resist rings and attempting to use those to gain some more health and regeneration. Now that I understand the basics of a build, I am finding I enjoy the little project aspect of the game as I try and improve various weaknesses of my build. Right now I am trying to figure out how to deal more damage without giving up the tanky nature that I crave so much.

Bargain Brass Dome

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Good Morning Friends! I always feel bad when I have to miss a day of my normal posting schedule like I did last Friday, but it was needed. I hinted a bit about this on my Gamepad.club account but essentially we had a routinely scheduled downtime go south on Thursday night, which led to some corruption and caused us to have to restore the machine from backup. This meant I was on a call until after 1 am and then up again at 6 am on another call… leaving me completely dead to the world and largely monosyllabic all day long. I am so not used to late nights like that and generally speaking I am heading to bed around 9:30 pm during weeknights and while I occasionally fuck around on my phone until midnight… there is a significant difference between that and being “on a call”.

Apparently, it was an international “set up your backyard” weekend because I saw several folks talking about working on theirs in my social feed. We drug out our patio furniture and set everything up this weekend. We even had lunch out on the patio just off our bedroom on Saturday and it was delightful. For whatever reason… last year we never really spent any time in the backyard. I think in part it was due to us getting a late start in setting things up and also the heat starting super early. We’ve had the two resin rockers for a half dozen years, but they are still extremely comfortable to sit out there and chill in. My wife spent a decent amount of time out reading, but I of course spent most of my free time over the weekend playing Path of Exile, but in theory, I could probably set that up on the Steam Deck and do that from the back patio as well.

As far as progress goes in Path of Exile, I have now completed all of the normal maps and am missing eight unique maps. I am going to try and get these through Kirac missions if I can, but eventually, I will get tired of waiting and just buy them from the market. I have to say this season was my absolute smoothest path through T16 maps. I think in total I took 3 deaths in ALL of my mapping… which is damned impressive given how in previous seasons I have barely limped across this line. I feel like I am finally getting a grasp on how exactly to make a build feel the way that I want it to feel, and I was shocked at how quickly I assembled a workable Righteous Fire build this time. Granted most of that knowledge does not directly translate to any other build, but it is nice to feel like I can solve my own problems finally. In theory, I also feel like I could probably build RF Juggernaut without following a guide at some point in the future given how far I have veered off the template at this point.

This is what I look like currently with my defensive layers in place… namely my armor flask and molten shell active. I finally have all of my flasks configured to use automatically when full, and with me regenerating 3 charges each time I get hit, they are rolling the majority of the time. The thing that I really want to work on is getting my life regeneration higher, so as I now start swapping out some of my gear for better options I am going to prioritize getting that a bit higher. Being wildly over-capped on resistances is in part due to the fact that I am running Purity of Elements. I am continuing to do this only because I have not wanted to solve getting immune to all of the elemental afflictions on their own. That is probably a calculation I will eventually work towards so I can run auras that increase my damage rather than quite as many defensive layers. I am running Defiance Banner right now only because I had the reservation space and my Stone Golem got to the point where it could no longer stay alive for more than a few minutes at a time.

I am about to make some shifts in my gearing that are going to add some significant benefits, like being at 90% physical reduction without buffs active. The Brass Dome has been nonsensically priced in this league given the popularity of RF and other tanky builds. I picked up this 4% max resistance version for 1 Divine and then spent about 150 Chaos Orbs in Jewelers, Chromatic, and Binding Orbs to get it to six links and the right colors. Still, this is a massive bargain as compared to the 10.5 Divine Orbs that an equivalent six-link in the right colors is going for right now. Essentially I am waiting to swap until I have finished level 95 and have another talent point to allocate. Right now if I made the swap I would lose more life regeneration than I am comfortable with until I can afford to allocate the “+15% life if no modifiers on chest” which should give me around 750 more life, and with that make up the difference in regen. At that point, I will swap over to a level 21/20% Righteous Fire instead of the Vaal Righteous Fire that I have been using.

I think once I am rocking my Brass Dome, the next major swap I am going to do is start shopping for a pseudo-six-link helm for Fire Trap. At the moment I am running a helm with “Socketed Gems Deal 30% more Burning Damage” and a shitload of armor. This is fine but I have one banked that I am working on getting chromed to the right colors that have level 20 Burning Damage and level 20 Less Duration, which should be a massive boost to my fire trap damage. The problem is I will need to replace my 30% reservation efficiency with Purity of Elements enchant from Eternal Labyrinth… and we all know how much I hate running that place. So essentially this is going to be one of my pet projects, but in truth, I would take Vitality or Determination reservation enchants as well. Those would probably be the better option given that at some point I hope to stop running Purity of Elements. Regardless it means I am going to have to start getting over my aversion to running the Labyrinth.

All of this… fiddling with numbers and stats and gear… is I think why I enjoy Path of Exile so much. I always loved gearing in MMORPGs and one of my favorite things to do back in the day was create a “hit list” of things that I wanted to farm up for my characters. Path of Exile absolutely scratches that itch for me and as I am getting items… I am often finding things that make me want to roll new characters to take advantage of that good luck. Now that I have a build that I thoroughly love in the Righteous Fire Juggernaut, I have this feeling that I am going to be starting with that for as long as it is not nerfed into the ground. Then from there, I will branch out into other builds like the Toxic Rain Pathfinder I am working on. I figured I would close out the post with this truly nonsense unique map drop from the other day. I specced my Atlas Tree into the node that duplicates map drops… and as a result, I have filled the guild bank up with unique maps to help anyone coming along behind me.

I hope you all have an excellent week, and I am sure I will be bringing even more Path of Exile nonsense.